The Listening Post takes a look at the on-air video wars following the Gaza flotilla attack. Mosaic Producer Jamal Dajani contributes to this report.

When news editors woke up on the first day of June, the story that an aid ship on course for Gaza had been raided by Israeli forces would have already come down the wire. The ship was called the Mavi Marmara and had a Turkish crew, nine of which were killed in the raid.

The vessel was also carrying a host of camera laden journalists, but strangely global news agencies only had two minutes of edited footage to broadcast. Why? Because all the journalists on board the Flotilla were incarcerated and their equipment confiscated, so the two minutes of footage that the world actually saw was carefully screened by the Israeli military.

Considering the whole incident took place over a number of hours yet the footage released represented just a fraction of that time, there appears a very deliberate effort to conceal details of what actually occurred. And many media outlets around the world were guilty of uncritically buying the limited narrative fed to them - that Israeli soldiers killed hostile flotilla crew members in self-defense. However, as the captive journalists were steadily released, so was their side of the story, the other angle for the broadcasters to consider - one of an aggressive military raid that claimed nine lives.

plus-circle Add Review

comment

Reviews